What Are The Challenges Of Growing Your Consulting Firm?

The growth of a consulting firm is based on much more than its volume of ongoing projects or the number of new clients signed: it depends above all on its talent. The challenges of growing a consulting firm lie in its ability to anticipate skills needs, recruit at the right time, and plan resources effectively.

Each consultant represents a direct share of the turnover: without rigorous management of the growth of a consulting firm, the risk of over-resource planning or missed projects increases. This is why this notion is intimately linked to that of recruitment: if the right profiles are not available at the right time, it is impossible to meet deadlines or ensure a good quality of service. This anticipation is at the heart of a company's success in the consulting sector.

Understanding the mechanics of growth in the consulting market

The consulting market in France is experiencing remarkable expansion: the sector has posted an average annual growth of nearly 9% since 2018, and forecasts for 2025 announce a further + 8% increase for strategy and management consulting according to this report.

This dynamic hides a more complex reality: the more business opportunities multiply, the more operational and HR tensions increase. Firms must now reconcile the volume of projects, the quality of execution and the availability of talent, or else profitability will erode.

Growth in proportion to available talent

How to measure the growth of a consulting company? Simply based on your talents, i.e. employees who have a set of skills that are difficult to find on the job market. In other words: the more qualified consultants you have that you can mobilize on a project, the more you can deliver – and invoice.

If the model is simple in appearance, it is actually very demanding. Apart from increasing your rates or changing your business model, you can't grow without recruiting. And if your recruitment needs are not anticipated from the sales phase, the entire chain seizes: you have to refuse assignments, your consultants are frequently overloaded, and you are sometimes forced to lower the quality of execution.

The limits of the current hierarchical model in consulting

Most of the IT Services are still structured according to a classic hierarchy: junior, manager, partner. But this model is quickly showing its limits, as customers are looking for experts who can understand their industry, business challenges, and context. According to the Syntec Conseil study, companies are now demanding shorter, business-oriented deliverables led by senior experts.

To better meet these needs, many firms are opting for a pyramid approach. They specialize by sector (health, finance, industry) or by skill (digital transformation, data, CSR). This model aligns the available skills with the expectations of the consulting market, while creating an environment conducive to upskilling.

HR issues: how does recruitment impact your growth?

Anticipate needs to avoid bottlenecks

In consulting, the gap between the resources available and those needed for a project is one of the main obstacles to the development of its activity. Too often, resources are only identified after the contract has been signed, or are not automatically transmitted between the CRM and HR tools. To avoid scheduling difficulties or mission delays, skills management should be identified early in the business process.

With a resource planning and consultant planning, this anticipation of needs translates directly into results: our clients see up to +20% more projects won, thanks to better visibility on available resources and necessary recruitments.

Retention and evolution: the key to long-term performance

Recruiting is not enough: you still need to retain your talents and encourage their skills to grow. The average turnover rate in consulting is up to 30%. This instability affects the quality of delivery, the continuity of projects and the coherence of teams. Beyond the human impact, the cost of a failed recruitment varies between €30,000 and €150,000.

These figures are a reminder that reactive HR management is not enough: a strategic approach to loyalty is needed.Some HR best practices to implement:

• To carry out a mapping of available skills ;
• Analyze your employees' development wishes;
• Create personalized career paths.

These elements promote professional development, continuous learning and the sustainable integration of consultants within the company.

Management of resource requirements on upcoming projects in Stafiz

Thanks to Stafiz, all this data is centralized and allows for real strategic support for employees throughout their careers, and promotes a sustainable alignment between performance and satisfaction. Our clients observe that this skills mapping improves the quality of assignments, speeds up meetings of resource planning and promotes talent retention through more tailored career paths. You benefit from a predictive view of profiles, their assignments and their availability.

"Before using Stafiz, we were unable to improve our resource planning. Thanks to Stafiz, we are managing our capacities much better and have improved our margins. Stafiz really improved our performance."

— Isabelle Lalet, HR Manager, Colorado Consulting

Automate sourcing and pipe management

The bigger your company gets, the less it is possible to manually manage your recruitment. Each advertisement attracts dozens, sometimes hundreds of applications. You have to centralize CVs, qualify the right profiles, organize interviews, send reminders or refusals...

With Stafiz, you can structure your pipeline, sort through CVs, track interviews, and find the best profiles at the right time in one click, even several months after their application.

The recruitment module

Commercial issues and market: how to differentiate yourself in a saturated market?

Differentiation through industry expertise and value

In 2025, the consulting markets are saturated: it is no longer viable to position oneself as a generalist firm. Customers expect specific answers to their challenges, carried by specialists who know their sector and their context: this is your lever of differentiation from your competitors.

Pricing and profitability: moving to value-based pricing

Faced with ever-increasing pressure on prices, some firms are moving from a T&M model to value-based pricing (VBP), i.e. invoicing based on the results obtained. You're no longer selling the time of a consultant, but consulting products, which are easier to sell at scale (and potentially multiply your prices by ten). However, this transition requires rigorous management of the consulting activity, margins, time spent and costs.

"Managing our projects has become so much easier since we started using Stafiz. The software has allowed us to automate our project and performance management. It was a real game-changer!"

— Raphaël Beziz, Director of Innovation & Transformation, YouMeO (BearingPoint)

By analyzing margins by segment or customer, a service company's growth can be aligned with its most profitable projects.

Operational and financial challenges: making growth scalable

To grow without losing the quality of the service, or disorganizing, 3 questions arise: 

• how to structure the growth of a consulting firm;
• how to anticipate future resource needs;
• how to automate key processes (and which ones).

An ERP for consulting firms addresses these issues by centralizing processes in a single environment.

Automation as a lever for scalability

When the missions multiply, the artisanal tools no longer follow. To maintain the quality of management in the growth phase, it is essential to digitize your internal processes: resource planning, project monitoring, invoicing, financial forecasts...

Automating these functions not only increases efficiency, but above all you know your costs and profitability in real time.  For example, the firm Artimis specializing in customer relationship management (50 employees) was still using Excel for their project monitoring and planning, which led to wasted time and errors. As a project management software for consulting firms, Stafiz has enabled them to automate their monitoring and give them the visibility they need to manage their business.

Planning and resource planning : avoid under or over-capacity

A consulting firm grows by aligning the right profiles, at the right time, with the right missions; This requires detailed planning over several months, adjustable in real time. Far from being a logistical constraint, the resource planning is a strategic lever that allows you to visualize future expenses, anticipate peaks in activity and project yourself in the long term. 

On average, firms using Stafiz are seeing a increase from +4 to +8 points on their utilization rate, thanks to better planning and finer allocation of their resources.

Predictive management and profitability

Managing a project well requires ensuring that profitability is achieved at each stage. To do this, you need a clear vision of what is realized and what is forecasted. Stafiz makes it possible to monitor financial performance on a project-by-project basis, while consolidating information at the project portfolio level. Margins, cash flow, time spent: everything is centralized to offer a dynamic, precise and actionable financial vision.

This control of forecasting has a direct impact on your revenue: consulting firms using Stafiz record an average of +3% in effective revenue, thanks to the optimization of the utilization rate and the reduction of losses related to non-billables.

Replication and standardization: learning from past projects

Each completed mission contains areas for improvement: taking advantage of your history allows you to understand your successes and analyze what needs to be corrected.

Stafiz gives you access to a detailed history by phase, task or deliverable and to numerous reports. This will help you identify risk areas, misestimated times, and performance gaps. Here's how to structure this approach with our management tool for consulting firms.

1. Break down projects into phases and tasks: To structure work into clear batches and accurately track the progress of each step.
2. Track the times achieved to measure the real effectiveness of deliverables and identify areas of deviation or drift.
3. Analyze mission indicators to evaluate the performance of the various missions.

Strategic challenges: managing long term and securing profitability

Cash flow management and anticipation of business dips

The growth of a consulting firm is only sustainable if it is based on solid financial management. You need to track your cash flow forecast, balance expenses and revenues, and adjust your planning based on cash flows.

"We made a call for tenders with fairly strict specifications and selected Stafiz for its value for money but also because Stafiz fulfills our specifications in terms of all the functional blocks: the resource planning, the HR part, expense reports, profitability monitoring, consolidated vision of all activity, etc."

— Jean-Pierre Vignes, Founder, JICAP Performance

Strategic management therefore begins with an ability to predict off-peak periods, and to organize your planning around this constraint. This allows you to align your workload plan with your financial objectives, to smooth out the activity throughout the year, and to avoid HR or commercial jolts.

Optimization of non-billable time

Training, internal meetings or R&D activities are useful for the smooth running of your practice and for skills development, but they do not directly affect your overall margin. According to our estimates, a firm of 10 consultants loses the equivalent of €780,000 in revenue per year on administrative tasks.

Stafiz helps you analyze and reduce the weight of non-billable time through:

• a detailed visibility on the real availability of resources,
• Accurate monitoring of utilization rate by profile, team or project,
• reports on the distribution between billable and non-billable.

Measuring the overall ROI of growth

Is your growth really generating value? More projects also mean more resources mobilized, and potentially more hidden costs: urgent recruitments, overloaded teams, non-billable tasks, etc. If these costs increase faster than your turnover, your business grows, but loses efficiency.

Analyze your growth from a performance perspective: 

• Per employee: their individual contribution to the margin and turnover.
• By project: margin achieved, financial landing, value delivered.
• By customer: average profitability, frequency of assignments, future potential.

In Stafiz, all your project data is centralized. By visualizing key KPIs, you will be able to identify high-performing projects and adjust your business priorities. Our customers observe an average increase of +15% to +20% in the project margin after a few months of using our software.

With an integrated solution like Stafiz, every firm can connect talent management, engagement information, and financials to turn their growth into a real profitability driver. The challenge is no longer just to grow your company, but to grow sustainably, by aligning talent, strategy and profitability.